What version control system is best designed to *prevent* concurrent editing?

Question

We've been using CVS (with TortoiseCVS interface) for years for both source control and wide-ranging document control (including binaries such as Word, Excel, Framemaker, test data, simulation results, etc.). Unlike typical version control systems, 99% of the time we want to prevent concurrent editing - when a user starts editing a file, the pre-edit version of the file becomes read only to everyone else.

Many of the people who will be using this are not programmers or even that computer savvy, so we're also looking for a system that let's people simply add documents to the repository, check out and edit a document (unless someone else is currently editing it), and check it back in with a minimum of fuss.

We've gotten this to work reasonably well with CVS + TortoiseCVS, but we're now considering Subversion and Mercurial (and open to others if they're a better fit) for their better version tracking, so I was wondering which one supported locking files most transparently. For example, we'd like exclusive locking enabled as the default, and we want to make it as difficult as possible for someone to accidentally start editing a file that someone else has checked out. For example when someone checks out a file for editing, it checks with the master database first even if they have not recently updated their sandbox. Maybe it even won't let a user check out a document if it's off the network and can't check in with the mothership.

Answer 1

Subversion offers enforced locking. When the Propoerty svn:needs-lock is set, the file is checked out read-only and the user needs to lock it to get an writable working copy. No other user can get the same file locked from there.